Date: 15 May 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
WARREN SONBERT
Wednesday 15 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Carriage Trade is Sonbert’s masterwork, a personal film postcard that weaves together glimpses of world travels collected over a six-year period. Its meticulously crafted form builds each adjacent shot in a musical rhythm, matching and contrasting, to create an effervescent and sophisticated silent meditation.
Warren Sonbert, Carriage Trade, 1971-72, 60 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
WARREN SONBERT
Wednesday 15 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
CARRIAGE TRADE
Warren Sonbert, USA, 1971-72, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min
“With Carriage Trade, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisenstein montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described Carriage Trade as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar world-wide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images.’” (Jon Gartenberg, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973)
“I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments, with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn. Each work as well is about a specific topic: Carriage Trade is about travel, transportation, anthropological investigation: four continents, four organized religions, customs; about time with its six years in the making and cast of thousands; about how the same people age and grow and change apartments … Some people are disturbed by the brevity of some of the images – particularly those that one might label ‘beautiful’ or ‘ecstatic’. They are over before one has a chance barely to luxuriate in them, they are taken away before one can nestle and coo and cuddle in the velveteen sheen of it all, so that feelings of deprivation, expectations dissolved, even sadomasochism arise. Very often a cut occurs before an action is complete. This becomes both metaphor of frustration, hopes dashed, and yet of serenity if you like – that perhaps all of this activity has been going on, will be going on, yet even all at the same time. That we are privileged viewers of many sectors of humanity, none taking precedence over the other. I believe that the nature of film lends itself to density: one can’t pack in too much, albeit with rests, breathing spaces. It isn’t necessary to have the totality of resonances immediately graspable, one should be able to return.” (Warren Sonbert, excerpt of a lecture at San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979)
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